Sound & Video Preference GUI doesn't save preferences

openSUSE 12.1 64bit KDE

Hi,

Having installed Skype successfully & setting up my usb Webcam re video I had difficulty in getting the Webcam’s microphone to record/transmit sound.
The “Sound & Video Configuration” GUI wouldn’t save my preferred options - I had to disable the internal microphone input before the Webcam mic was preferred.
Also, Kmix won’t run.
I have experienced the same problem with Kubuntu 11.10 but not with Mandriva 2011 KDE.
This is my first proper full installation of SUSE & I am enjoying it. I just wondered if the above problem is a bug in KDE or something I’m doing wrong?

Many thanks,

openSUSE 11.4 & 12.1 use the PulseAudio system. I can say I have not heard of a problem where the KDE mixer will not load. I wonder if you might not want to read through this info on Pulse?

Pulseaudio Basics for openSUSE with pavucontrol - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

I also have an audio test bash script that can be helpful you can try:

S.T.A.R.T. - SuSE Terminal Audio Reporting Tool - Version 1.12 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

If you have audio and Skype is working, maybe not having KMIX is not a problem, but its not that normal for it to not load.

Thank You,

Thanks jdmcdaniel3](http://forums.opensuse.org/members/jdmcdaniel3.html)
Thanks for that. Yeah, I got Skype going fine in the end.
As mentioned in your links, I had installed pavucontrol - experience from using Ubuntu/Kubuntu. A very useful tool. I get confused between Phonon & PulseAudio :-o
On further investigation, Kmix launches from the sound icon in the System Tray but not from the main menu. However, paucontrol does the necessary & works well so it’s really no problem in the end. Just a bit confusing.

Thanks again :slight_smile:

Here are the definitions:

Phonon (KDE)

Phonon is the multimedia API provided by Qt and is the standard abstraction for handling multimedia streams within the KDE Software Compilation 4.

Phonon was originally created to allow KDE 4 to be independent of any single multimedia framework such as GStreamer or xine and to provide a stable API for KDE 4’s lifetime. It was done for various reasons: to create a simple KDE/Qt style multimedia API, to better support native multimedia frameworks on Windows and Mac OS X, and to fix problems of frameworks becoming unmaintained or having API or ABI instability. Subsequently it has been moved to Qt and can therefore be used independent of KDE.

PulseAudio

PulseAudio is a sound server, a background process accepting sound input from one or more sources (processes or capture devices) and redirecting it to one or more sinks (sound cards, remote network PulseAudio servers, or other processes). [3]

One of the goals of PulseAudio is to reroute all sound streams through it, including those from processes that attempt to directly access the hardware (like legacy OSS applications). PulseAudio achieves this by providing adapters to applications using other audio systems, like aRts and ESD.

In a typical installation scenario under Linux, the user configures ALSA to use a virtual device provided by PulseAudio. Thus, applications using ALSA will output sound to PulseAudio, which then uses ALSA itself to access the real sound card. PulseAudio also provides its own native interface to applications that want to support PulseAudio directly, as well as a legacy interface for ESD applications, making it suitable as a drop-in replacement for ESD.

For OSS applications, PulseAudio provides the padsp utility, which replaces device files such as /dev/dsp, tricking the applications into believing that they have exclusive control over the sound card. In reality, their output is rerouted through PulseAudio.

Phonon is KDE specific (in my opinion) while PulseAudio is not. The main thing however is that you are working OK as you require.

Thank You,

I think I had the same problem. The root cause were old kmix config files from previous KDE versions. See what this command will give you:

find ~/ -iname "*kmix*"

On my system it looks like this :

grzes@opensuse:~> find ~/ -iname "*kmix*"
/home/grzes/.kde4_old/share/apps/kmix.old
/home/grzes/.kde4_old/share/apps/kmix
/home/grzes/.kde4_old/share/config/kmixctrlrc
/home/grzes/.kde4_old/share/config/session/kmix_1011b109daed000127460710200000267050009_1274612021_154789
/home/grzes/.kde4_old/share/config/kmixctrlrc.backup
/home/grzes/.kde4_old/share/config/kmixrc
/home/grzes/.kde4_old/share/config/kmixrc.backup
/home/grzes/.kde4/share/config/kmixctrlrc
/home/grzes/.kde4/share/config/kmixrc

the files under .lde4_old where the old versions. Once I deleted them logged out and logged in to KDE the problems were gone.